Functionalities of a hearing device become increasingly advanced. Wireless communications between a hearing device and external devices, such as hearing device fitting apparatus, tablets, smart phones and remote controllers, have evolved. A wireless communication interface of a hearing device uses an open standard-based interface. However, this poses many challenges in terms of security. A hearing device may assume any incoming data as legitimate, and may allow memory to be written or changed by an unauthorized party. Any such attacks may result in a malfunction of the hearing device, or a battery exhaustion attack.
However a hearing device is a very small device with strict constraints in terms of computational power, memory space etc. Off-the-shelf security algorithms and protocols cannot be readily functional on a hearing device.